In recent years, telephone call centers have become much more widespread. The call centers manage many efforts, and calling agents working in these centers often place thousands of calls to various customers in different regions of the country. These agents often use headsets to speak with customers while the agents concurrently enter information relating to the customers into a computer workstation.
Under the traditional approach, companies interacted with potential customers in person. Telephone call centers have become more widespread as a result of a desire by many of such companies to interact with customers via telephone instead. Using this form of communication, calling agents are able to conduct many transactions in a short period of time.
There are a wide variety of transactions carried out by these telephone call centers. For example, banks may want to contact current customers and ask them customers if they would be interested in obtaining a new credit card. Long distance telephone companies may want to contact homeowners and ask if they would be interested in switching long distance carriers. Fund raisers may call individuals to ask for donations. And various other telemarketers may call homeowners or business owners for solicitation of various products or services.
Because there are so many different types of customers and transaction types, calling agents who work in telephone call centers will often need extensive training. It is often difficult for the agents to perform certain tasks that involve multiple steps (such as introducing a purchase order, making a sale, introducing a service order, etc.) without a significant amount of training. The agents often do not know how to navigate through the different steps that are needed to complete such tasks. In order to allow the calling agents to navigate through the system without difficulty, companies may need to spend large amounts of time and money for training. They may require training for customer service, as well as training for the various forms of product or service types being solicited.
As a result, many telephone call centers utilize calling scripts that can be used by the agents. When the agents interact with customers, they can simply read these scripts to the customers rather than having to commit a script to memory. Scripts are very helpful in such situations, because they can provide the agents with detailed information for use in the dialogues with customers.
In addition to the use of scripts, telephone call centers may implement an entire scripting program for use by their agents. For example, when using a first script for the program, a telephone call agent may ask a customer a question. The response will be entered into the call center system by the agent, such as by depressing a predetermined button on the agent's keyboard or by selecting the proper response from a list using a mouse or other pointing device. As a result of this feedback from the customer, the scripting program will then determine and display the next predetermined script for that program.
These scripting programs have proven to be very useful. The scripts provided in such programs, however, contain certain limitations. For example, the traditional scripting programs provide predetermined script information. Though the scripts may be particular to the scenario presented in the session between a calling agent and a customer, the contents of the scripts contained predetermined information that is static (i.e., not configurable at run time). As such, calling agents may still be required to remember specific information pertaining to the session with the customer.